But Verizon is better in my area, and I want to try this "instant credit" I heard someone talk about..where you have to have like 300 open on a credit card, and they dont check your credit....how can I do this?

I quit selling cellular about a year ago and they still did instant credit then, I don't know about now.

You needed $250 open to buy on your credit card - it's a hold for however long your bank keeps holds - usually a few days - but as long as two weeks (first premier is two weeks) the card is never charged.

I would avoid Verizon.I had airtouch b4 the merger.
I tried to get a 6.5 year old 90 day late deleted and
they were intractable.I probably paid them over 10,000 dollars in airtime in later years with a perfect history.That is the only negative on my Transunion
and I'll have to wait 6months for it to clear.Point
being if you choose Verizon, don't even think of paying late.It will stay with you a full seven years.

I was a Customer Service Supervisor for a MAJOR wireless carrier. The company I worked for had recurring CC charges. It was called service limit monitoring. If you were the type of person that had teh basic rate plan and didn't use the phone much it was a good thing.

Here is the catch. Lets say you have unlimited off peak. The billing system (at the time, I am not sure if they corrected the problem or not) would bill you for all the time used. So it may hit your credit card 2 or three times per month. Once you reached 200 bucks it would zap your credit card, even though you would have nights and weekends free. Then at the end of the billing cycle the credits would come. It was horrible! I spent a good portion of my day handling escalated calls for this reason. Customers would call seething! Their phones would get turned off if the cc declined, even though they had a credit balance on their account. Plus, they didn't pay any fees for over the limit charges ect. I did usually because at the end of the call I was bloodied, beaten, an scarred.

Most of the representatives hated to deal with service limit monitoring customers. They knew it was an ecalated call, and sometimes supervisors would refuse to take the calls <laughing> I know because I used to see it all day. Plus their was a stimatism attached to these customers. Everyone knew they had poor credit, and most of the time they were treated like it.

Most wireless carriers have a very liberal scoring model, yes they have their own. I say all of that to say, if you have to pay the 200 deposit. pay it you will save yourself a lot of hardache and grief.

Very well put...The service limit monitoring program was not working for the reasons outlined above and AT&T never could get it right, so they dropped the program entirely. Now, Sprint is approving almost everybody with no security deposit and a $125 monthly allowance.